REV. BILL HYBELS: The father of Willow Creek

Manya A. BrachearTribune staff reporter

Rev. Bill Hybels opens his eyes at dawn, rolls out of bed and lands on his knees. For 10 minutes, he says, he kneels in prayer, thanking God.

That one-on-one time came more easily three decades ago, when Hybels was an evangelist working outside the mainstream, launching an experimental ministry called Willow Creek Community Church.Now Willow Creek is a big part of the mainstream, the South Barrington-based megachurch at the forefront of an international phenomenon counting almost 12,000 congregations.

And Hybels has become a power broker in evangelical Christianity, the CEO of a movement. This year he stepped away from Willow Creek's day-to-day operations to concentrate on expanding the ministry to the unchurched abroad and to broaden its urban, multicultural reach at home.

"In the early days I was the father, the mother, the uncle, the aunt, the grandmother. I was really the only teacher, the only pastor," he said. "These days ... the church's dependency on me has gone down just exactly the way we planned it."

Last week, the church made headlines in his absence by planning to move its fledgling Chicago congregation into the historic Auditorium Theatre. This week, Hybels will attend Willow's annual leadership summit, where more than 50,000 pastors and key volunteers are expected to attend or tune in via satellite.

But Hybels said none of that means much if he can't find the time to cultivate his personal relationship with God, whether it is grabbing 10 minutes first thing in the morning or taking more time away from the 20,000-member church to go to his summer home in Michigan.

"I can't do a gourmet meal if I can't get the time in the kitchen," said Hybels, 54. "If I don't have mechanisms in place to lower my RPMs and help me focus, I'll just hydroplane over things I shouldn't hydroplane over. I'm an activist personality. I like high challenge, high speed, high risk."

Unlike other pastors who televise sermons to build an audience, Hybels shies away from cameras, instead urging members to invite friends to church.

Still, his reputation precedes him. A recent survey of more than 2,000 non-Catholic pastors chose Willow Creek as the most influential congregation in the U.S. Last year Time magazine hailed Hybels for pioneering a contemporary style of worship.

Since 1992, he has mentored a growing number of congregations around the world that aim to be like Willow--if not in size, then in philosophy. Amid all that, he still preaches regularly at his home church.

Because of the demands his prominence places on his time, those sermons are the best, and sometimes only, way for church members to get to know Hybels.

He often speaks candidly to the congregation about his wife, Lynne, and the struggles they have faced in their marriage, ministry and adventures raising two children.

"From the pulpit he opens up his world, his life more than most people ever do," said Greg Ferguson, Willow Creek's vocalist and songwriter and Hybels' running partner.

Too good to pass up

Born and raised in Kalamazoo, Mich., Hybels comes from Dutch ancestry and Calvinist theology. He inherited the work ethic of his father, an entrepreneur in wholesale produce, and spent every Sunday with his family in the pews of the Christian Reformed Church.

But not until he attended a Christian summer camp in Wisconsin as a teen did Hybels grasp God's love to be unconditional, too good to pass up.

"That's where I first understood the central message of redemption, that something was done for me by Christ and was available to me as a gift, as opposed to there being some standard I had to try to achieve at the risk of my soul," he said.

After pursuing, then abandoning the family business, Hybels felt himself being pulled toward Christian ministry. Soon he moved to Chicago to become a youth minister.

He enrolled at Trinity International University in Deerfield. There he met visiting professor Gilbert Bilezikian, who emphasized the importance of building a biblical church where worshipers have a personal relationship with God.

"He had had a powerful conversion experience, but he felt lonely within it because he couldn't relate it to the life of the church, which was my case also," Bilezikian said.

Determined to spark excitement among adults and live out that vision, Hybels and a team of idealistic 20-somethings opened a new church in October 1975, naming it after the space they rented--Palatine's Willow Creek Theatre. They were cowboys, breaking rules and working hard to make church fun.

Live bands and concise, practical sermons quickly earned Willow Creek a reputation for promoting "Christianity Lite." The start-up church made a rule that visitors would not contribute to the collection plate--a rule that at first imposed considerable financial strain.

But the formula worked. Attendance had grown exponentially by the end of the first year, and Hybels and his team soon bought and built on land in South Barrington.

In the late 1980s the national media caught wind of Willow's success, playing up its outreach to spiritual seekers as a "consumer-driven" approach to attract more "customers"--terminology Hybels dislikes.

But the attention brought still more members, prompting the church to develop a small-group ministry that exists to this day to help newcomers find friends in the enormous congregation.

To avoid criticism, Hybels capped his salary in 1987 at $87,000. This year church elders raised his annual salary, to $95,000, with a $20,000 housing allowance. The church also pays for his BMW. He will not disclose how much he makes in royalties from the sale of books and audio sermons.

Success--but at a price

By 1991, Willow Creek was so successful that an evangelical Christian at Harvard Business School proposed to conduct a case study. A year later, Jim Mellado would join up with Hybels as president of the Willow Creek Association, an alliance of 11,700 churches that share Willow's core philosophies. Hybels considers himself first among equals in the fraternity of evangelical pastors.

But the church's growth also took a professional and personal toll on Hybels, who had married his longtime sweetheart in 1974 and quickly had children.

By 1990 he felt he had to recharge. Piloting a borrowed sailboat, he renewed a lifelong love of the water and spent more of his summers reconnecting with his family and with God.

In 1994 about a quarter of the church's staff and a third of the lay leadership left, saying they were burned out by the church's fast pace and lack of personal touch. The exodus inspired Hybels to further examine his management style and his expectations. After a long discussion with his wife, he bought a sailboat of his own and started spending his summers at a cottage in South Haven, Mich.

The getaway "gives him and both of us together time to consider and reconsider the future," said Lynne Hybels, who has watched her husband mellow over the years. "Many men of his personality type would not be willing to engage in that. It takes time and energy."

Hybels' daughter, Shauna Niequist, 29, knows the church consumed much of her father's time while she and her brother, Todd, grew up. She recalls his presence more than his absence. When she started to wander from her faith in college, Hybels played it cool, she said.

"I was looking for a reason to rebel, and they really didn't give me one," she said. "When I was ready, I came back."

Niequist is equally grateful her father intervened when she hesitated to marry the man who is now her husband. In the middle of the night Hybels called his daughter from Copenhagen and warned her not to blow it. The couple is expecting Hybels' first grandchild in October.

Cradled in his arms

Before he escapes for the summer, there is one rite of passage he never misses--the annual baptism in Willow Creek's pond. More than 500 teens and adults wade into the water so that Hybels or another pastor can cradle them in his arms, proclaim their conversion "in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit" and douse them.

In South Haven, Hybels has contemplated his wife's vision of expanding Willow Creek's global outreach. After a trip to Africa, she challenged her husband to respond to the AIDS crisis there by providing medical and hospice care.

Hybels has also used the downtime to develop his vision of building a more multicultural church. Last year he and seven pastors from predominantly white, black, Latino and Asian evangelical churches around Chicago began meeting monthly to collaborate on a community service project. And for several summers, he and Rev. James Meeks of Salem Baptist Church in Chicago have marched with others across a bridge in Selma, Ala., to commemorate the civil rights struggle.

"I am one of those prototypical, white educated folks who wonder why there is still a problem. If the laws have been changed and if everyone is voting and there is equal opportunity, why is there any lingering difficulty?" Hybels admitted to a group of worshipers at the First Baptist Church in Selma. "As the church started to grow and exposure to the world began to increase, I began to become more aware of some of the tensions between races."

Reaching out to diversity

Part of his response has been the opening of the downtown Chicago branch, one of four Willow Creek satellites. The church also hired a pastor to lead a Spanish worship service.

And Hybels insists on casting more minorities in the church's Broadway-style stage productions that have earned national acclaim and often bring worshipers to their feet.

While everyone in the sanctuary sways and waves their arms in praise, Hybels stands, his hands folded behind him, his eyes closed in contemplation. Even if that makes him seem a little out of place in his own church, he figures it might help somebody else in the crowd feel a little more comfortable.

"I'm not an arm waver and a clapper and a dancer," he said. "Music doesn't do that to me, although it stirs me inside. I think there's a contingent of people at Willow who gain some permission to stay in their true response because they know I do. They're glad I stay true to my wiring. It gives them permission to stay true to theirs."